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The benefits of IMAP and open: iPhone and Joyent Mail

By David Young 21 July 07

Among the benefits of using open source (Joyent Mail) and open protocols (IMAP) is being able to use IMAP clients such as Outlook, Vista Mail, Thunderbird, Mail.app.

Why is IMAP great? Simply, it allows me to use email on different devices (a laptop, a desktop, a mobile device, a web client) while keeping all the devices in sync.

I’m very impressed by the IMAP client that ships with the Apple iPhone. Because it is a true IMAP client, unlike the behavior using a Blackberry, I’m able to read and respond to mail using the iPhone, file mail into folders, all the things that makes IMAP great. When I get back to using my laptop, IMAP ensures that everything is synched properly.

Now that Joyent Mail is open-sourced and free, we can work to make the workflow even better. For example, Joyent supports IMAP folders (some people think hierarchically), but also supports a rich tagging/keyword infrastructure (not yet supported in IMAP). I’d also like to see more work done to integrate IMAP with CalDAV (group calendaring, Joyent Calendar) with a view towards creating a true competitor to Exchange.


  1. Why the hell does IMAP on blackberries suck so bad?

    And why the hell does the iPhone not support exchange?

    Is it too much to ask for a phone to support both exchange and imap?

    — Joe Van Dyk    714 days ago    #

  2. I thought IMAP support tags since ages. It’s called flags and the RFC (3501) specifies some system flags and supports user defined flags. I think that thunderbird 2 supports assigning these flags.

    Regards, Frank

    — Frank Fischer    714 days ago    #

  3. @Frank: You’re right. However, section 2.3.2 of the RFC states that servers “MAY” (emphasis in the document) allow for non-system flags (the type that could be used as tags). It’s not a given.

    Further, it doesn’t seem to me there is a way to move tag clouds between devices (even using Thunderbird 2). If I tag a given email message “foo” using Thunderbird 2 on my laptop, the “foo” tag doesn’t appear on the same email message when read using Thunderbird 2 on my desktop (as far as I can tell), let alone appear as a tag I can use for other emails.

    — David Young    714 days ago    #

  4. Some phones can do both if you have the right software. My Nokia N80 does IMAP natively (tested with Joyent) and I use Roadsync by Dataviz to do MS ActiveSync for Exchange. There’s a GMail app for it too.

    — Michael    714 days ago    #

  5. Regarding tags in Thunderbird, they are not really well implemented.

    The ‘foo’ tag created from client 1 can be seen from Thunderbird if it is added in the preferences pane (odd design, though) ; see ‘Edit -> Preferences -> Display -> Tags’.

    This solution is not very smart because it requires to know all the IMAP keywords and to add them each time a new account is configured in Thunderbird.

    — kael    712 days ago    #

  6. Slightly off topic:

    My biggest issue with email in general on iPhone is the lack of client side spam filtering. I have access to my IMAP junk folder, but don’t have an automatic way of moving items there based on even simple rules.

    — shofr    712 days ago    #

  7. As David pointed out, a given IMAP implementation may or may not support keywords – which is the basis of tagging.

    We’ve already been down that road with Connector. Courier’s IMAP implementation, which we use, becomes horrifically slow as the number of distinct keywords in a given mailbox increases due to the way it (Courier) stores and indexes these keywords internally. Other IMAP implementations had varying degrees of user defined keyword support, generally even more inadequate than Courier.

    -Scott

    — Scott Barron    712 days ago    #

  8. My iPhone works great with Joyent’s IMAP – I love it. The only thing missing is spam protection, and it is sorely missed.

    — Raymond Brigleb    711 days ago    #

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